People's Republic of China (Alternative Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact)
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a sovereign state in East Asia. It is the world's most populous state, with a population of over 1.5 billion. The PRC is a single-party state governed by the Communist Party, with its seat of government in the capital city of Beijing, the second largest city. The largest city is Shanghai. It exercises jurisdiction over 23 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau), and had claimed sovereignty over the Republic of China (island of Taiwan) off the southeast coast of the mainland until 2008. Covering approximately 11,199,154 km2 (4,323,290 sq mi), China is the world's third largest state by land area, and the third largest by total area. China's landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in the arid north to subtropical forests in the wetter south. The Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, run from the Tibetan Plateau to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China's coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometres (9,000 mi) long, and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East and South China Seas. It borders the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union to the west, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the southwest, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma to the south, Laos and Vietnam to the southeast, and North Korea and the Democratic Republic of Finland to the northeast. It also shares maritime borders with South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. China is a cradle of civilization, with its known history beginning with an ancient civilization – one of the world's earliest – that flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties. Since 221 BCE, when the Qin Dynasty first conquered several states to form a Chinese empire, the state has expanded, fractured and reformed numerous times. The Republic of China (ROC) replaced the last dynasty in 1912, and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the Communist Party of China in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the People's Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, while the ROC government relocated to Taiwan with its capital in Taipei. Both the ROC and PRC continued to claim to be the legitimate government of all China until 2008, when China invaded and annexted the ROC during World War III. During the Cold War, China emerged as a major military superpower. It developed nuclear weapons with support from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and conducted its first nuclear test in 1964. Increased extreme tensions with the Democratic Republic of Finland, an recognized global superpower, in the 1960s and 1970s led China to concentrate most of its military forces along the border between China and the Democratic Republic of Finland, in particular the Finnish Far East. By the early 1990s, China possessed over 10,000 nuclear weapons, leading China to be recognized as the world's fourth global superpower, and the third global superpower of the Eastern Bloc, after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Finland. During the Korean War, China deployed the People's Volunteer Army to aid North Korea, and during the Vietnam War it supported North Vietnam. In the mid-1970s, major political and economic reforms resulted in China becoming the world's fastest-growing major economy, with growth rates of over 10 percent for 30 years. By the 1990s, China had become an recognized economic and military superpower. Relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Finland improved vastly in the mid-1990s, leading to the withdrawal of Chinese troops stationed along the Chinese-Finnish border. The 2000s saw the rise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union once again as a military superpower, and the expansion of NATO. China, like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Finland, saw the expansion of NATO as a great threat, and rapidly increased its military expenditure. Like its two allies, the People's Republic of China would expand its stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, which would peak at 25,000 nuclear warheads, compared to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union's 52,500 nuclear warheads and the Democratic Republic of Finland's 25,500 nuclear warheads. Category:Nations (Alternative Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact) Category:Warsaw Pact (Alternative Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact) Category:People's Republic of China (Alternative Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact) Category:Eastern Bloc (Alternative Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact)